Michelle Carter’s “Rose in America,” now in an AlterTheater world premiere production, is very close to being the play about race and identity politics that we desperately need right now.

It’s not afraid to be intellectual. The first scene takes place on the first day of a “performance practicum” (i.e., a student-led grad school class) in a dance, theater and performance studies program, with students Tisha (Nkechi Emeruwa) and Kemi (AeJay Mitchell) bandying about terms like “reconstructivist” and “transcontextual” as if they were everyday speech.

They’re certainly not everyday — at least, not at first — for the course’s third and final student, Anthony (Dorian Lockett), who, as the others celebrate their shared vocabulary and affluent backgrounds, when asked where he did his undergrad, replies, “You wouldn’t know it.”

“Rose in America” is also steeped in history — theatrical history, the history of the gay movement, civil rights history. The three students get inspiration for their project from the 1965 play “Rose in the Jungle,” about Viola, a white woman from Detroit who travels to the South to support blacks during the march from Selma and gets killed by the KKK. (“Rose in the Jungle” is fictional, but is loosely based on the murder of Viola Liuzzo.)

They take it apart and add their own material, including movement, song and interviews with the historical figures who inspired the play’s characters, weaving it all together and performing the resulting play-within-a-play in a heightened, non-naturalistic manner that interrogates the very troubling aspects of “Rose in the Jungle”: its white savior narrative, its stereotypical Sambo character, its elision of the people who made the sacrifices that made Viola’s sacrifice possible.

Tisha, Kemi and Anthony assume they can get away with performing a recontextualized version of this published script because they believe its author is dead. He’s not. He’s alive, if not kicking, in the form of Wally (Charles Dean), a broken man who never changes out of his pajamas and watches a home shopping channel all day, enabled by his younger partner, Jack (John Patrick Moore).

“Rose in America” lets none of its characters off the hook. Not Wally for implying that, because he’s gay, he understands what it’s like to be black; not Jack for insisting that his good intentions and credentials — he teaches at a predominantly black school — make him an equally legitimate participant in any conversation about race; not Anthony for performing and brandishing the role of working-class hero and forcing his definition of blackness onto others; and not Tisha and Kemi for their privilege, their blindness to the past activism that made possible their ivory tower version of social justice.

It’s easy to see yourself, and your complicity in perpetuating oppressive power structures, in Carter’s flawed and complex characters and their heady, honest debates. The script has huge potential, but this production, directed by Regina Victoria Fields with additional direction by Jayne Wenger, feels very under-rehearsed. It wasn’t just that, on opening night, the cast flubbed so many lines as to make you worry they wouldn’t be able to get some scenes back on track; many moments lacked the energy that comes from an actor’s sharp clarity about his or her intention.

That exacerbated some of the weaker parts of Carter’s script, for instance, when Kemi switches, sans transition, from dismissing Wally as an irrelevant old white guy to wanting to write a book about him, or when Tisha and Anthony keep abruptly starting and cutting off an urgent argument about their project as if they’re powered by intermittent batteries.

But this production should not be the last chapter of “Rose in America.” This brave, discomfiting story is exactly the kind of script the Bay Area needs to invest in.